'Sovereigns' determined to live outside laws of the land

Fueled by government angst, the Internet and the recession, this unorganized sect of tax-evaders and law-shruggers is growing in North Carolina and across the country.

By EMILY WEAVER Times-News Staff Writer

People have railed against taxes and swiped at the hands of over-reaching government officials for centuries. In the late 1700s, the antigovernment militias were viewed as Patriots. Today, they're called domestic terrorists, extremists, far-right radicals… “sovereign citizens.”

Fueled by government angst, the Internet and the recession, this unorganized sect of tax-evaders and law-shruggers is growing in North Carolina and across the country.

Transylvania and Henderson counties are estimated to have as many as a few hundred who share the beliefs that people are born sovereign, but become enslaved by a government that has no authority.

They live by the rule of “inalienable rights,” often dismissing the government's claims that they must pay taxes, register their vehicles, drive with a license, pay a mortgage and exist with Social Security numbers.

Their ideology was thrust into the national spotlight after Jerry Kane and his 16-year-old son, Joseph, were killed in a shootout with police in a Wal-Mart parking lot in West Memphis, Ark., in 2010. Two officers were injured in the shootout. An hour earlier, Joseph Kane was captured on dash cam footage gunning down two more officers in a traffic stop.

More recently, on the morning of June 6, a “sovereign citizen” named Dennis Ronald Marx, 48, raced his sport utility vehicle to the steps of the Forsyth County Courthouse in Cummings, Ga. He was 45 minutes late to a plea hearing on charges of distributing marijuana and possessing firearms and he was coming in armed, according to the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights.

Marx wore a gas mask and bulletproof vest and carried grenades, homemade explosive devices, an assault rifle and several magazines of ammunition. He was shot dead on the scene.

The shocking acts of “homegrown terrorists” have commandeered headlines across the country, putting law enforcement officers on alert and prompting judicial officials to do their homework. The sovereign ideology has reached Western North Carolina, but its adherents have committed no violent acts.

Instead, local officials say, they are “paper terrorists.” They come with paper… reams of paper with countless citations to codes not often considered.

“One of the things that they're the most widely known for is paper terrorism. As a matter of fact, that stack of papers beside the box, that's all the stuff I've gotten from sovereign citizens. It's a crazy amount of stuff,” said Transylvania County Sheriff David Mahoney, pointing to a stack of paperwork more than a foot high.

The stack includes interrogatories, cease and desist orders directing the sheriff not to serve foreclosure notices and a schedule of fines to be levied against his office for any future actions against a sovereign.

It also included at least one self-declaration of death mailed in an attempt to get out of a mortgage payment. The sender declared his “corporate self” deceased, which he said no longer required him, “the living, breathing person,” to pay the mortgage his corporate clone entered into.

The paperwork came certified mail at costs for some senders that dwarfed the price of simply renewing a driver's license. It cited references to the U.S. Constitution, the Uniform Commercial Code and maritime law in efforts to escape state charges.

The way some sovereigns have fought the so-called “system” has cocked a few heads. A simple driving without a license offense is combated by numerous motions and sometimes lawsuits, filed in the very courts they question.

The sovereigns will convene their own courts to issue warrants for judges and police officers and in retribution, they have levied million-dollar liens against the public figures, who stood in their way.

N.C. General Assembly House Bill 203 went into effect Dec. 1, 2012 to protect law enforcement officers and public officials from any false liens. The act of filing false liens against a property is now considered a Class I felony.

The video footage of the traffic stop that claimed the lives of West Memphis police Sgt. Brandon Paudert, 39, and Officer Bill Evans, 38, is haunting. The scenario for some officers is all too familiar.

A car is stopped. An officer asks for the driver's license and registration, but instead they get stacks of paperwork and they hear this manifesto: “I declare myself a legal sovereign, operating under common law, Title 4, U.S.C., 1, the flag of peace and secure all my rights under (the Uniform Commercial Code) U.C.C. 1-207. I am not a corporate being dealing in commerce, requiring a license of any kind. I travel by right and not by privilege. Anything you say or do in violation of my rights can and will be used against you in a court of law.”

Officers here have been lucky that those words have not kickstarted a confrontation that has ended in death, but the threat remains. Pulling over one sovereign in the past has led to several others showing up.

“It's something that we tell our folks to keep in the back of your mind, not to be distracted by this,” Mahoney said. “If you observed a traffic violation and you're pulling them over to investigate that violation further, stay focused on that, remember your officer safety and don't get caught up in the rhetoric.”

Mahoney served as a guest speaker at an FBI-sponsored training conference on the sovereign citizen movement about a year-and-a-half ago. His deputies have received special training.

The staff is taught the movement's varied ideology and how to avoid the pitfalls of different distractions that may be hurled their way in encounters. If unprepared, the distractions can create an unsafe environment, Mahoney said.

“It's our job to try to make sure the highways and byways and neighborhoods are safe and in doing so, we're going to come in contact with people that disagree with what we're doing, whether they're sovereign citizens or not,” Mahoney said. “It's not our job to argue with those folks and try to convince them that we're right. It's our job just to be fair, respectful and professional and enforce the law courteously.”

Denying the law seems to be a losing battle for sovereigns here. Despite filing lawsuits, liens and continuous motions and killing off their corporate selves, they still face foreclosure, eviction and jail time.

“We're seeing more and more occurrences where there are people that show up and they make comments in court that they are not subject to the law,” said District Attorney Greg Newman. They say the “court has no jurisdiction over them, but of course that's not the way it works.”

“The laws are the laws and they apply to everybody,” Mahoney said.

Getting through to some die-hard believers, though, can be a challenge.

“They file a great deal of what they call motions,” said Chief District Court Judge Athena Brooks for judicial District 29B. “Each of those motions need to be addressed, but when you try to call the case and you try to address them, they start out with, 'I don't recognize you having jurisdiction,' so you can't get much further than that.”

Brooks often responds by saying, “I understand you have the right to your opinion, but we're here and the Constitution says I do have jurisdiction, so let's move on to the next issue.”

Sometimes it works. Sometimes she doesn't get that far.

Law enforcement officers have described sovereign tactics as “smoke and mirrors” — ploys to confuse and confound the system to the point where officers and the courts decide in frustration to look away.

But they aren't looking away here. And when the smoke clears, the mirrors reflect a different image of what the FBI refers to as “anti-government extremists,” whose bag of tricks include “white-collar scams.”

The FBI cited cases of sovereigns cooking up fraudulent insurance schemes that bilked millions of dollars, phony diplomatic credentials that swindled thousands more, and several cases of money laundering and tax evasion.

“The first thing you have to understand is there's no such thing as a sovereign citizen, that's an oxymoron, OK? A sovereign is a free person. A citizen is a slaved person,” said Larry Weingartz.

The Pisgah Forest man claims no affiliation with the title.

“Either you're a sovereign or you're a citizen. I'm a non-citizen. I'm a noncitizen American natural,” he said in a phone conversation last month. “I recognize human law, but the law is so distorted now because they've distorted it with statutes.

“Statute is not law,” he said.

Weingartz says we are born with lawful “inalienable rights.”

“Now they can't take that away because its unalienable, unalienable … rights that we have, but they've hidden it from us,” he said. “The people don't know we are like God. They think we're citizens. Everybody wants to say, 'yeah I'm a citizen, I'm a citizen.' Well that makes you a slave. And if you acknowledge that you're a citizen, you're acknowledging that you're a slave.”

Justifications of exactly why and how the government became defunct varies from sovereign to noncitizen. But somewhere in America's history, according to them, the nation was secretly replaced and the law lost its authority in a quagmire of corrupt corporations.

The “corporate self,” also known as a “strawman,” identified by capitalized names on birth certificates, licenses and tax forms, is linked to vast sums of money held by the U.S. Treasury, according to sovereign ideology.

The theory that they can lay claim to that “money” is “based on the premise that the government has secretly pledged them as security for the country's debts,” which came into play when the country abandoned the gold standard, according to a study by the UNC School of Government.

Often using lowercased or hyphenated versions of their names, sovereigns claim their corporate clones (referred to in all caps) dead in an effort to use the strawman's account to pay mortgages or other debts.

“Sovereigns believe that if they can find just the right combination of words, punctuation, paper, ink color and timing, they can have anything they want — freedom from taxes, unlimited wealth, and life without licenses, fees or laws, are all just a few strangely worded documents away. It's the modern-day equivalent of 'abracadabra,'” wrote author J.J. MacNab in an article for the Southern Poverty Law Center.

MacNab and the SPLC have studied the sovereign movement extensively.

In the days following Weingartz's interview, he lost his home to foreclosure and was arrested on a bench warrant for failure to appear on a misdemeanor in Henderson County. ___Reach Weaver at emily. weaver@blueridgenow.com or 828- 694-7867.